Field of the Invention
This invention relates generally to the field of computer processors. More particularly, the invention relates to an apparatus and method for performing efficient gather and scatter operations.
Description of the Related Art
“Gather” and “scatter” operations are used to work with large, sparsely populated matrices. For example, existing computer processors perform gather operations to collect the elements of a matrix from memory and store them in a highly compressed format (e.g., sorted contiguously in an ordered array). Conversely, to perform various matrix operations (e.g., matrix multiplication) existing computer processors execute scatter operations to reproduce the previously-gathered matrix in memory.